How the U.S. Is Wasting Its Global Predominance

The end of the millennium coincides with America’s preeminence turning into predominance. Never before has a single country achieved comparable ascendancy globally and in so many fields of endeavor, from weaponry to entrepreneurship, from technology to popular culture.

Yet, America’s dominance has expressed itself less as a strategic design than as a series of seemingly unrelated decisions in response to specific crises and driven less by an overarching concept than by domestic pressure groups. It came about in an administration preoccupied with domestic politics and whose leading members were shaped by the protests of the early 1970s deprecating the role of power and seeking to replace it with “new age” issues like the environment and humanitarianism. Ironically, the Clinton administration has more frequently used military power than any of its postwar counterparts.

In the heyday of their preeminence, the Roman and British empires transformed their power into consensus and their governing principles into widely accepted norms. The United States has yet to achieve such influence. Its decisions shape international events to an unprecedented degree, but they have often appeared, especially to non-Americans, as either arbitrary or random responses to domestic constituencies. One result has been to spur groupings of nations to reclaim greater freedom for regional or national decisions.

The problem goes beyond the administration’s biases. A society that has never known a permanent threat has been tempted by the end of the Cold War to impose its preferences unilaterally, without calculating the reactions of other peoples or the long-range costs. Highly competitive media have compounded the tendency for foreign policy to become a subdivision of domestic politics. Partly as a reaction to this unilateralism, the European Union has emerged from the successful Kosovo war with a determination to forge an independent defense capability, calls for an Asian bloc have multiplied and even Mercosur in Latin America is veering toward a more confrontational rationale.

Administration diplomacy has been most successful where the challenge was most comparable to domestic politics, as in the Arab-Israeli negotiations. It has not managed to integrate either Russia or China into a workable international order. It has failed to develop a strategy for the two most fundamental issues of global order: how to deal with rogue states and how to translate our moral values into an operational diplomacy.

Iraq has been a test case for U.S. policy toward such states. The Clinton administration codified the U.N. inspection system imposed after the Gulf War and tough sanctions into a containment strategy designed, in the words of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, to “put Saddam in a box.”

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein accelerated his pursuit of three objectives that have guided his policy: 1) to shift the world’s attention away from Iraq’s flouting of U.N. obligations and to the alleged harm being done by U.N. sanctions to Iraq’s population; 2) to magnify and force into the open the latent disagreements among the permanent members of the Security Council over Iraq; and 3) to involve the U.N. secretary-general as a mediator, thus placing Hussein’s grievances on par with his adversaries’.

President Bill Clinton reacted by ordering airstrikes. But the administration’s ambivalence over the use of power for strategic or political objectives turned that enterprise into a cover for abandoning the inspection system. Unrelated to any specific political demand, the bombing lasted but three nights and earned us opprobrium without political benefit.

These events have left Hussein far closer to his objectives than the United States is to its goals. U.N. inspectors have not returned to Iraq. And the U.N.’s diplomatic focus on lifting the sanctions, supported by three of the five permanent members of the Security Council, has made their end or emasculation seem only a question of time.

As a result, the Gulf War victory is in danger of unraveling. None of the Gulf states believe in the possibility of reconciliation with Iraq. When Iran’s hard-line leaders see how a defeated neighbor succeeds in defying a multilateral coalition ostensibly headed by the United States, their incentive for moderation will surely diminish. A political vacuum is emerging in which an ambivalent United States will be obliged, without significant allies, to defend the weak Gulf states against the two strongest states in the region, hardly an ideal example for deterring rogue states globally.

The administration’s strategic and political paralysis in dealing with the rogue challenge has been overshadowed by the most dramatic use of NATO military power since World War II: the bombing campaign over Kosovo. Nothing shows more clearly the administration’s emotional priorities than the fact that it devoted 78 days to destroying the infrastructure of Serbia, a country representing no strategic threat, and only three nights to overcoming Hussein’s eviction of U.N. inspectors, heretofore considered the key to stability in the vital Persian Gulf.

Both Washington and London trumpeted their humanitarian foreign policy as the progressive alternative to traditional diplomacy based on equilibrium. But life has been far more complicated. Ethnic cleansing by Serbs, which the U.S. and its allies rightly resisted, has been replaced by ethnic cleansing by Albanians. Nor has the Kosovo intervention solved the political problem that gave rise to it. NATO occupation of Kosovo is based on a U.N. resolution that explicitly describes Kosovo as an autonomous part of Yugoslavia and reaffirms the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all Yugoslavia. Neither of these provisions has been implemented or has a prospect of being implemented. In the name of a humanitarian foreign policy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has maneuvered itself into a position in which it is condemned either to the permanent occupation of Kosovo or to seeking a different U.N. rationale to permit the emergence of an independent Kosovo. But an independent Kosovo is precisely what all NATO states have sought to avoid.

Six months after the proclaimed triumph over Kosovo, the West’s reaction to Russian repression of Chechnya showed that Kosovo had established no general principle. Russia, as Serbia, is trying to impose its rule on a dissident province; as in Kosovo, the conflict between the Orthodox Christianity of the rulers and the Islamic faith of the rebels is religious in origin; and, as in the Balkans, the rulers seek to break the will of their subjects by making their lives in their home province unendurable.

What differs is the reaction of the Western allies. They criticize Russia only to placate critics at home rather than affect decisions in Moscow. Both in official statements and in the media, the “freedom fighters” of Kosovo have been transmuted by tacit abdication into the “rebels” of Chechnya. Moscow is criticized, if at all, for inflicting excessive casualties, not for the purpose of the operation.

The reluctance to jeopardize relations with Russia is understandable. But just as in Kosovo the absence of historical perspective caused us to veer too far in the direction of moral crusades, we have now erred by adopting too narrow a definition of the national interest. Even granting that blocking Russian intervention was impossible, it nevertheless was important to discourage Russia from future attempts to rely on force in regulating its relations with its many neighbors.

Moral precepts are absolute and make no allowance for historical evolution. When thwarted, they allow no fallback. But foreign policy must deal with nuances and processes rather than terminal points. Public-relations myths--or worse, self-delusion--cannot serve as a substitute. New-age diplomacy has not abolished the need to strike a balance between a society’s ideals and the necessities of its place in the world. Oscillation between overcommitment and abdication will vitiate our power and our capacity to shape a stable international order.